WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Phil Kerpen

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment, joins WRFH to dicuss President Donald Trump’s second term agenda. Having taken the oath of office, from taxes and regulation to immigration, health care, and beyond, what policies should Donald Trump pursue as he begins his second term?From 01/24/25

You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Michael Hart, and today I am talking to Phil Kirpin, the president of American commitment, about all things within the new Trump administration. So thank you so much for joining us. First off, I'd love to just hear what American commitment is and what it plans to do. Well, American commitment is a national free market advocacy group. We work really on all the fiscal economic and regulatory issues, and we try to jump into the fights where a little bit more citizen education

engagement might make the difference and tip the outcome in a more free market direction. So we do a lot of letters to Congress supporting our opposing bills, letters to regulatory agencies, that kind of thing. And all our stuff is on the website, Americancommitment.org. Perfect. Yeah, I was going to ask where people could find what work you guys are doing over there. So we are just a few days into the new Trump administration. What are your initial thought so far on what the president has done in just a few short days? Well, I've been incredibly impressed with the quality and the quantity of policy that we've seen out of the administration in just the first week. I mean, it seems like it's been a couple of months, and it's been less than a week.

It's pretty remarkable. Very first day, we got a federal hiring freeze, a back-to-office order, regulation freeze, pause on foreign aid, an order protecting First Amendment against government censorship and collusion with big tech companies. We got pretty much an omnibus reversal of all of Biden's anti-energy regulations, including the electric vehicle mandates and his gas appliance bans. We got three international agreements that we withdrew from the Paris Climate Treaty, the World Health Organization, and the OECD minimum tax agreement. And then, you know, that was like the first day. And the second day, we got an end to racial preferences going back 60 years, all the way back to Lyndon Johnson. and basically the word going out inside the federal government and any company that does business with the federal government,

you're not allowed to discriminate it anymore, even if it's discrimination against, you know, white people. And that's pretty remarkable sea change. And so they haven't flowed down much either. It's been a very steady, very steady beat of policy. And I didn't even mention any of the border stuff. So that's a whole other suite of actions that we've seen immediately. and they've already had, you know, flights of deportations and all of that going on.

So it's about as eventful of first week as I can ever remember in terms of policy and a change in direction for the country. And it's a pretty stark contrast, I think, to what we saw eight years ago, where Trump really sort of had a little trouble getting out of the starting blocks. And this time he's got all of this stuff ready to go. Yeah, that was going to be another question I wanted to bring up is, what do you think the main factor in that? that difference is, but in this new White House, it seems like there has a different tone now going in. Do you think it's staff? Do you think it's just Trump having an understanding of what D.C. actually is in the beast that it is? What do you think is actually allowing for him to now just go in there and do all of these things on day one and get going? Well, I think it's definitely

that he's got more knowledge and experience. He's definitely got better staff. But also, I mean, he's not being actively sabotaged by Russia Gate and Comey and them trying to knock his national security advisor out, and the Washington Post calling for his impeachment before even took office and inauguration day having, you know, black block activists, firebombing limousines. I mean, remember all the stuff that happened last time, it was essentially all of the elites and kind of the leftist shock trips doing everything they could to destroy his presidency before it even began. And this time, I think that a lot of elites in the media, you know, they still hate Trump, but they're sort of chastened that, you know, their total resistance tactics backfired and were unsuccessful. And now they're sort of reconciling themselves that they need to sort of pull back a little and let him have a normal transition, let him have this period. And also, the other difference is, you know, his approval ratings are much, much higher right now.

He's got a lot more political capital. And, you know, not only is he in the high 50s of approval ratings overall, but he's in the high 50s. 50s with pretty much every demographic. And so, you know, there's basically no racial divide or ethnic divide in his support level. And he's in a very strong position right now, and that's very different from last time as well. But, you know, I also think the other factor also is, you know, he had four years that he, you know, was sort of, you know, wishes he's been president watching Biden do all these terrible things. And I'm sure making lists and being, you know, getting, getting all the staff ready. And so it's, you know, we haven't happened since Grover Cleveland.

and certainly hasn't happened in modern times to have somebody be present, leave, and come back. And I think that a lot of this huge burst of initial energy just comes from the fact that, you know, he probably had a whole second-term agenda in his mind before he left at the end of his first term, and he just wasn't able to do it. And he's got all this stuff built up and ready to go now. Yeah, you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Michael Hart, and today I'm talking to Phil Corpin of the President of American Commitment. So you were talking about Joe Biden a little bit there.

He made some last-minute pardons for family members. What precedent does that set? And how can Trump move forward to ensure that justice is brought back into a balance in this country? I mean, we've seen the weaponization that happened to Trump himself and so many others throughout this country. What does he do with that? Well, I mean, I think these pardons were really obscene. And, of course, you know, we saw the Hunter one was the first one, you know, relatively early in the land. amduck period. And then, you know, his last day in the morning, we got the Anthony Fauci

pardon going all the way back to January 2014, which means it was to cover not just his many perjuries that he committed to Congress, but also his illegal funding of the gain of function research at the Wuhan lab that likely started the COVID virus. And, you know, he's now never going to be held criminally responsible for that even, you know, even if otherwise should have been because of this pardoned that's been backdated all the way to 2014. And, you know, he pardoned Millie, who basically confessed to treason, said he disobeyed lawful orders of the president, which is not the job of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And it's interesting. So left goes wild about, you know, calling rioters from January 6th coup plotters and insurrection and all this kind

of thing. And Millie actually literally did engage in military coup. He disobeyed his civilian leadership. And, you know, now he's going to enjoy a pardon for that. And, you know, we Everyone who worked on the January 6th Commission and all the members and all the stuff, they've all been pardoned, which is pretty strange to have members of Congress, House, and Senate who, you know, very possibly committed criminal offenses and have been preemptively pardoned for them, and now they're going to be there voting on bills and everything like that. And so that was the morning of inauguration day, and everyone thought that was outrageous enough. And then, you know, 30 minutes before he left office, Biden pardoned six family members, including his brother,

the same, you know, 2014 retroactive language, you know, to cover all of the shady dealings with China and Ukraine and everything else. And so I do think it's pretty outrageous. And, you know, I think the answer is a proposal from a professor at Harvard, Stephen Sachs, a proposed constitutional amendment that would suspend the pardon hour for basically from 30 days before national election until the next inauguration. And I think we've got to pass something. something like that, because, you know, if you had that in place, Biden might have done all this stuff, but he would have been forced to do it before the election. And that would have really hurt Democrats, which would have been well-deserved. And so, you know, if you're going to have a

pardon power, you know, with no other restrictions, it should at least have to be exercised before the elections for the American people can see it. And so I'd like to see Congress act on that. It's very hard to oppose that. Even for Democrats who hate Trump and all this, do you want him to have a lame duck period where he can pardon anyone he wants, including his own family and whatever else. I mean, I don't think you should. So I would hope that that's got a chance. I think it's a very good idea. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit to talking about still maybe a little bit of House and Senate stuff and voting with all of them, but Trump needs a strong cabinet to get his work done. Nominees are starting to get confirmed as we're seeing with

Rubio for Secretary of State and Ratcliffe at the CIA. Are you concerned about some of his nominees? And could you just tell our listeners how important nominees are to, um, and their work that they do for the president and this whole nomination process. Well, it's very important to get his team in place. And I think that almost all of the nominees have been of a very high quality this time. I think they did a pretty good job identifying people. But the Democrats are certainly trying to stall. I mean, they're requiring all of the procedural steps, for instance,

for Pete Hags' confirmation, which is kind of crazy to basically force the president for the first week, not to have the person he wants running the Pentagon. on, you know, unless you've got really extraordinary circumstances where somebody is not qualified or is, you know, really problematic nominee, historically, they get, they get approved, and they get approved very, very quickly. And you've got some very strange going on right now where people like Lisa Murkowski who voted for basically every single nominee for everything that Biden put up saying, oh, I can't vote for Pete Heggssef because, you know, there's some smears against him in the media. So Democrats and a handful of Republicans are going to stall. things a bit, but I think that ultimately Trump will get essentially his whole team in place. And it's just a matter of whether they can, you know, shorten his presidency by a week or two in

some of these areas by stalling things out. Yeah. As we said, though, Trump has already done a lot of executive orders and talking about that, like if they're trying to shorten within a few weeks of that. But what do you think the president's first 100 days will look like? Do you think that he'll get more done this time and when we already alluded to that a bit? but do you think that his first hundred days will just be a lot more packed? And also, do you think this time around the House and Senate will work with him more?

Well, I think that all these executive orders are great, but they have to be implemented. They all direct the agencies to do things, but the agencies have to actually withdraw the regulations they're supposed to and so on and so forth. You've got to go through all of the procedural steps very carefully, are you losing court? And, of course, you know, there are liberal lawyers and judges that want to catch them tripping up any way possible. And so this is all going to have to be seen through very carefully. And I do think that, look, Trump is an incredible charm offensive right now with the Republican members of the House because he knows he needs almost every single one of them. And I don't know if the man just never sleeps or what, but somehow it's been reported he's already met with half of the Republican House members. I don't know where he's fitting that in because he's been in public on, you know, almost continuously for the past week.

But, you know, he's going to need almost every House member, almost every House Republican because he's got almost no more. margin there right now. And there are a lot of these things that he can do through, you know, through executive branch rulemaking and executive orders and so forth. But probably the single most important thing from an economic standpoint is not letting the tax cuts expire at the end of the year because if they expire, it's about a $3,000 tax hike on every single taxpayer in the country. It's going to really crush the economy. It's going to destroy millions of jobs. And he can't pass a tax bill on his home. He needs there's no way to do that without Congress. And so that to me is the really critical heavy lift that he's going to need to get near unanimity with Republicans on.

And, of course, he doesn't just want to extend last time's tax cuts. He wants to add all the tax cuts he campaigned on this time also. So tax is going to be the one area where he really is going to need to lean hard and try to get unanimity among Republicans and get it done quickly. He has set the deadline a little longer than 100 days for that. He said Memorial Day, which I think is about 150 days. But the later in the year you go without having it done, the more the economic, damage starts to be encouraged just from the uncertainty and lack of clarity about what the tax rules are going to be for next year, even if ultimately you get it done late in the year,

that's not going to be very good economically or politically. So they've really got to make a strong early push on that, I think. And then, you know, the other sort of piece of the pie for the economy, a piece of a puzzle, I should say, you know, you've got regulation, which he's got, you know, been out of the gun with some really, really aggressive actions. I think we're going to have a very strong deregulatory environment. You've got tax. But then there's the third piece, which has been the hardest historically, and that's spending restraint.

And, you know, his first term, I remember Mick Mulvaney had a great, great budget, and basically Republican leaders on the Hill said, don't do it, don't do it. Cutting spending is never good politically. Just spend more, and Trump sort of caved to that and signed some omnibus bills. But I think he regretted, and I think this time around he's going to be much more assertive on spending cuts, and he's got Doge, which is going to be a huge platform. for supporting cuts. We've got Ron Johnson writing a budget on the Senate side that I think is going to be pretty aggressive on finding cuts. But that's going to be an enormous challenge

because no Democrats going to vote for any spending cuts. And so to actually get that done, again, just like on tax, they're going to need near unanimity among Republicans. And if tax is hard, cutting spending is even harder. So that's going to be difficult to do. I should mention though, Micah, that the president has a legal theory that may allow him to cut spending even without Congress. And that's this argument that Mark Palletta, who's going to be General Counsel of OMB, has developed that the 1974 impoundment control act is unconstitutional. And for your listeners, who might not know this prior to 1974, when Congress set an appropriation level, that was a ceiling on how much the president could spend. But if he could accomplish

the congressional purpose for less, he didn't have to spend all money. So in other words, it used to be if Congress said we've appropriated $100 million for a bridge and the president could build it for $40 million, the other $60 million didn't get spent. It got sent back to the Treasury use for deficit reduction, et cetera. Since 1974, Congress has claimed that every penny they appropriate must be spent, even if it's totally unnecessary, even if it's totally wasteful. And Trump is going to argue that that law is unconstitutional, that he has an inherent power as the President not to spend more than necessary. And I don't know where the courts will come out on that. But if he actually wins that argument, we could see substantial spending reductions

just from eliminating waste inside the executor branch. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Mike Ahart, and I'm talking to Phil Kirpin, president of American commitment today, about President Trump's agenda and what he will be doing early on in his presidency and onward. So you're talking about these tax cuts that are set to expire, and we're talking about the closeness in the House.

Are you concerned at all about some House members who are going to have to, they have really tight race, some of them even in districts that Harris won? How do they balance that? Because as you said, Trump can't lose any votes in the House, and Democrats aren't going to bail Republicans out on this. So what do they do? Do you think there has to be looks at mandatory spending

or cuts to certain things or Social Security needs to be looked at? What do you think the concerns there for Trump and the House leadership specifically? Well, I think he promised not to cut Social Security or Medicare benefits. So I don't think he will do that. I think that there are a lot of potential savings in Medicaid. We may see that program block granted to the states. We may see work requirements put in because we have a huge number of able-bodied working-age adults with no dependents who were put on Medicaid with the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.

And there's a lot of potential for cost savings there, especially if we can move people who are not working into work and they can get better employer-based coverage. So I think that's a win-win opportunity. There's something they can do on Medicare, for instance. I'd really like to see them push site-neutral payments, the way it works now. You know, if you have a hospital system that buys up a doctor's office, a doctor's practice, suddenly Medicare pays more. They pay more for the same doctor visit, literally in the same building just because the practice has been bought by a hospital system and how they pay higher hospital rates than they pay

physicians' rates. That's crazy. So they need to fix that and adopt site-neutral payments and end this incentive for massive consolidation, and waste of money there. But Social Security, you know, I don't really see, unfortunately, anyway, they're going to adopt any meaningful savings on that, just with the politics of it and everything else. But even there is a lot, I think, on the discretionary side that they're going to find

with what Elon's doing. And so there's an opportunity, you know, one of the arguments that Ron Johnson makes that's really effective, as he points out, you know, if we were, if we just go back to pre-COVID spending levels and increase them by, you know, population growth and inflation growth and even exempt defense and social security and interest and put those on what they are now. We'd have a balanced budget right now. And so I look forward to seeing his budget and what it looks like and, you know, whether it aligns with what Trump wants to do.

Are you optimistic that we could have a balanced budget within the near future or do you think that's just going to be not feasible with given the, uh, number, the market? origins on the house and how things have to relate to each other. Well, balance would be a huge challenge, but you know, you don't necessarily have to get to the balance for the debt to be manageable. If you can raise your income, then the same debt burden becomes much more manageable. And for the country, that means boosting GDP and having strong economic growth. And I think that if we get the deregulation, we get the tax cuts, we get some modest restraint on spending, we're going to be able to grow the economy much, much

faster and that's going to make the debt much more manageable, even if we don't quite get to balance. Do you think something Trump will look at two in spending is looking at how much we give to other countries in aid and assistance? Do you think that's something that he's really going to consider? I mean, some of his executive orders may be looking at that too. Definitely. Michael, one of the day one executive orders was a temporary pause on all foreign aid spending while they sort of, you know, reassess it and decide how much of it makes sense.

And this is a big part, I think, of what voters voted for with the America First agenda, this idea of, you know, when we have needs here at home, we can't be spending so much abroad. So I definitely think that's going to be part of the spending debate. Yeah, you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Mike O'Hartt, talking to Phil Kirpin, a president of American commitment. So I just have one or two more questions for you. I'd love to just quickly talk about immigration. And, I mean, we were talking a little about this earlier, but like there has been a block on the birthright citizenship temporary block on it by a federal judge.

Do you think that a lot of these orders on immigration specifically will receive this type of backlash in the courts? And how does the president then secure the border and make sure that America safe, that's what he's promised to do? And also, I mean, though we are seeing images of people literally being sent back already, though. So are you concerned about courts with this? Yeah.

Well, I mean, look, the Democrats are always going to run to a friendly judge and try to stop things that way. and obviously they've already got some injunctions, like the one you mentioned. I think that Trump can largely secure the border, even without that executive order, just bringing back a lot of the policies he had in his first term that were very successful in using diplomatic pressure and tariff threats on Mexico to get them to implement remaining Mexico on their side. And, of course, you know, if migrants can't get out of Mexico into the U.S.,

a lot of them won't even go into Mexico because there's not much point of crossing into Mexico if you're not going to be able to leave. So I think they can stem the flow. The birthright question is a tough one. A lot of legal scholars come down on both sides of that. I don't really know who's got a better argument in terms of what the 14th Amendment was supposed to mean, but I would just caution people that this is not the kind of thing where John Roberts is likely to go with President Trump, in my opinion. And if he can convince one of Kavanaugh or Barrett, I think this, of all the executive orders,

I think that's the one that's most likely to lose in the courts. Now, my last question for you is just, what advice do you have for the president? If you can just give him a short little piece of advice, what would you say to him about moving forward and how he can keep his promises to the American people? Well, I just think that he's got to maximize what he can do here in the beginning when he's riding high where he's got his approval ratings up in the high 50s. He's never been here before. They never be here again.

and we don't know how long we'll even have a majority in the house. A lot of things can happen when it's this tight. You could have a couple of people die. You could have, I mean, who knows what could happen. You could somehow lose one of these specials. It's supposed to be a safe seat. So I think they need to be very aggressive and move very quickly, and it's great all the things he's doing on the executive side,

but, you know, he can't do the tax bill without Congress. So he's got to lean him very hard on that and get that done as soon as possible. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I've been talking to Phil Kirpen of the President. of American Commitment. Where can people find your work if they want to go look out more of what you do? Check out Americancommitment.org and also you can follow me on X. It's my last name, Kirp and KERP-E-N. Thank you so much for joining today. I greatly appreciate it.